The Secret Life of Headington Quarry: People’S History in the Field

4 The Secret Life of Headington Quarry: People’s History in the Field Raphael Samuel (second from right) and History Workshop students outside Ruskin, Oxford 1980 Raphael Samuel Archive, Bishopsgate Institute, London, courtesy of Alison Light and the Raphael Samuel Estate . 131 THE HISTORIES OF RAPHAEL SAMUEL Masons Arms pub, Quarry School Place Road, Headington Quarry, Oxfordshire, 1969 In the summer of ’69, the unobserved-observer, quietly ensconced in a snug in the Masons Arms pub, would have witnessed an intriguing spectacle. An unusual visitor had joined the usual array of Quarry drinkers that year. This was long before the days when village pubs arrayed their exteriors with hanging baskets and served gourmet seasonal lunches. The Masons Arms was still very much a ‘local’ place where newcomers were noticed. And this ‘stranger’ would have been particularly noticeable. This stranger was a historian, a tutor at the workers’ college, in Oxford city. He and some of students had been visiting the Quarry for some time now. They all seemed to be absolutely fascinated by the place. On this occasion the newcomer was alone, conducting another one of his interviews. Whilst casually dressed, scruffy even, everything about him, from the poise with which he held himself to his educated accent betrayed him as different.1 Even his name, ‘Raphael Samuel’, would have sounded exotic and different. Not from Oxford. Not a working man.2 Yet so sincere was his interest that slowly the Masons Arms’ locals had started to share with him their most prized memories and secrets. What might those old Quarry boys have made of all this? Perched in their accustomed spots, hands rested on pint glasses or fingers nimbly rolling cigarettes, listening solemnly with rapt concentration as one or other of them recited their remembrances and spun out the old tales to the eager delight of this stranger and his cumbersome recording equipment.3 Perhaps they were a little suspicious, unused to finding so receptive an audience amongst the younger generations. Perhaps they enjoyed the process, the opportunity to resurrect and reinvent their younger selves, to revisit old grievances and relive old triumphs: 1 Chimen Abramsky, ‘Raphael Samuel’, The Jewish Chronicle, 17 January 1997. 2 Samuel noted the ‘class barriers’ between himself and his interview subjects. Brian Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 23 October 1979, 19 Elder Street, London, transcripts held in Raphael Samuel Archive (RSA), Bishopsgate Institute, London. 3 Samuel remembers pint and cigarette fumes during the interview process. Ibid. 132 4 . THE SECRET LIFE OF HEADINGTON QUarry [D]id old Crowy tell you? As when they used to have to come in Quarry – now I be going back ninety years ago – what I heard Granny Webb tell me – that when the policeman come in the Quarry on ’orses they took’m off the horse and put him down the well.4 It certainly made them think about things that they had not brought to mind for many years. As memories proved patchy or treacherous, the speakers pondered over whom amongst their connections and acquaintances would be able to fill in the spaces. Furthermore, could they convince these possible informants, their friends and relatives, to talk to this man?5 This process of talking and remembering also caused arguments to break out amongst them about the way things used to be, but even when these squabbles broke out the historian Samuel was unperturbed.6 In fact he seemed all the more enthralled. The contrast between the men’s thick local Oxfordshire accent and the newcomer’s University of Oxford English was almost comic, yet he could not have been a more attentive or appreciative audience.7 He really seemed to be trying to piece together a picture of the Quarry back as it was before they put in the roads. Even back before old Bessie had opened up her shop and started selling all those delicious cheap pies.8 The picture that Samuel had been trying to construct went much deeper than a concern for the sequence of events that may or may not have taken place in the village all those years ago. Samuel was gleaning information from all manner of clues, not simply from the stories themselves, but from the very nature of their performance. During the 1970s, Samuel published his first major historical publication. Now a well-established Ruskin tutor, and having gained some distance from the events and activities of the first New Left, he had spent the last decade or so learning his own historian’s craft alongside his students. Taking his first major oral history essay ‘Quarry Roughs’ (published in the first History Workshop (HW) book collection Village Life and 4 Raphael Samuel, ‘“Quarry Roughs”: Life and Labour in Headington Quarry, 1860–1920. An essay in oral history’, in Samuel, ed., Village Life and Labour (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 151. 5 Samuel referred to ‘little cousinhoods’ as providing much of the core qualitative material. Brian Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 23 October 1979. 6 Samuel, Village Life and Labour, 247, note 85. 7 The quotes in Village Life and Labour are written out in full dialect. For an example of Samuel’s speaking voice: Bishopsgate Library’s channel, ‘Raphael Samuel on history from below, 1990’, uploaded 5 January 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=w96_Nf-RJHs (accessed May 2014). 8 Samuel, ‘“Quarry Roughs”’, 243. 133 THE HISTORIES OF RAPHAEL SAMUEL Labour, 1975) as its focus, this chapter explores the development of his historical imagination during the early 1970s. To further illustrate this, it also considers more closely the contrast between Samuel and E.P. Thompson as historical and political thinkers. This, it argues, lay as much in their distinctive personalities and backgrounds as in their generational difference. Headington Quarry: Origins and influences The research into the community of Headington Quarry was pedagogical in its origin. Since his arrival at Ruskin College, Samuel had been battling to force an experience of primary sources on his students, something missing from the college’s existing history syllabus. As part of this attempt, he designed four- to five-week projects for the students to undertake before they wrote any history essays or read any textbooks. This was how Headington Quarry came about. Samuel had found documents in the Oxfordshire County Record Office relating to a 30-year struggle between the Quarry community and local authorities, which had ended in an act of communal incendiarism in 1880. Not only were the documents relating to this study available and ‘manageable’, the subject matter and location of the project made it an attractive project to Ruskin students. Not only were first-year Ruskin students based out in Headington, but the poetic appeal of this common rights struggle happening right on the doorstep of Oxford University was attractive. He was delighted to have found a part of Oxford ‘that wasn’t Anglican and wasn’t Tory and wasn’t College and was historical’.9 During the course of this initial phase, some of the students visited the Quarry independently and returned with tales of its wildness, enhancing its potential for a more in-depth case study into ‘living history’.10 He described his own attraction to such an approach: I think the whole idea of the micro, of the small-scale, of seeing large things in miniature was important. I mean if you’re kind of in revolt against abstraction, reductionism, systemisation – I mean wanting something that, as it were was congruent to how you actually experience life, I mean you could find a whole number of different ways in different subjects in 9 Brian Harrison, Interview with Raphael Samuel, 23 October 1979. 10 Ibid. 134 4 . THE SECRET LIFE OF HEADINGTON QUarry which people were reaching round, often, as I think in retrospect, quite unsatisfactorily, but I mean the effort was to produce something that was more life-like, more real, corresponded more to the human experience, the texture of human speech, the scale of human life i.e the community as studied …11 The roots of his ‘revolt against abstraction, reduction and systemization’ could be discerned in the New Left debates, in part a reaction against Stalinism, but also a response to the ‘social science’ turn that had begun to dominate intellectual culture. Some of his most polemical writing had been levelled against the application of sociological methodologies and modelling to explain social issues, such as the effects of affluence on voting behaviour or the causes of juvenile delinquency amongst adolescent boys.12 As a history tutor at Ruskin, he had also rallied against prevailing forms of social, economic and labour history. The substantial growth of social history, as championed by vehicles such as Past and Present (P&P), had done much to fracture the stranglehold of traditional political history, but whilst it had successfully expanded the subject matter on which historians worked, little inroad had been made into to the ways of thinking about history. In some incarnations, social history remained unreflective on the question of politics, content to accumulate facts in contribution to existing debates (such as rates of industrialisation or changes to standards of living and so on). Where it did engage with politics (like at Ruskin, a self-identified workers’ college), this was often on a literal level; the internal histories of unions, union leaders, the details of legislative reform in labour and industrial relations. In other forms, it drew upon simplistic sociological models, such as ‘nineteenth century v. status models of class’, for which it provided factual information. In short, it offered few satisfying answers to the nature of the relationship between material conditions and social-political consciousness.

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